Bands bypass iTunes by streaming music through iPhone apps

If you're a Presidents of the United States of America fan, you can now listen …

What's a good way to release your entire back catalog of music to a large audience without having to deal with the bureaucratic red tape of the record labels and the iTunes Store? Release it yourself through the App Store, of course. The album-as-an-iPhone-app method has been experimented with by some bands already, but the Presidents of the United States of America (yes, the guys behind the "Peaches" song) have gone all out, selling its entire discography through the App Store in hopes of engaging fans in ways they couldn't through the iTunes Store alone.

The app, called "The Presidents' Music - PUSA," sells for $2.99 on the App Store (iTunes link) offers users access to four full albums, including the band's early "lost" recordings. This includes the previously-unavailable FroggyStyle—"unless you have one of the 500 cassettes the band sold in 1994, you've never heard this before," reads the app description. The app also features a number of extras and exclusives that the band says are updated regularly, and fans can read the band's blog directly from the app on their iPhones or iPod touches.

The music, however, is not actually contained within the application itself; instead, it is streamed to the app from a server, requiring the user to be connected to a network of some kind (iPhone users on the cell or WiFi network, iPod touch users on WiFi) in order to access the media. This allows the band to constantly update the app's offerings, but it also makes it possible for them to pull content at any time. For $3, however, it could most certainly be worth re-living your teen years, and if you find yourself dying to keep the songs around for longer, there are buttons that allow you to buy the music for your permanent collection.

In a way, this method is almost the beginning of the iTunes subscription model, except controlled entirely by the bands (and not technically subscription, since the fee is not recurring). It allows users to try before they buy to their heart's content—so long as the music stays on the server—and for very little money up front. And if the music does eventually go away, they're only out a few bucks and hopefully still entertained.

PUSA isn't the first band to go the App Store route. Snow Patrol made headlines in September of 2008 after it released an "interactive album" for the iPhone and iPod touch that included images, lyrics, artwork, and even videos. And PUSA singer-turned-entrepreneur Dave Dederer thinks this is all just the beginning. "The possibilities around these open app stores, with Apple being the first and foremost, and hopefully RIM, Android, and others to follow in terms of size and impact—they've radically changed the mobile application, because they're open," Dederer told Wired. "You don't have to negotiate, you don't have to go through the process of approval with a big carrier."

More importantly, Dederer sees the value of bringing distribution control back to the bands themselves. "If all the rights to the masters and the publishing are contained—if the artist has control of them or the label has control of them, they can sell music in this entirely new format," said Dederer, "The first one we're doing is for my band, The Presidents... you can sort of pump anything in there that you want, at random. Maybe we'll put my bandmate Chris Ballow's answering machine message on there... it becomes an open conduit to the fans to promote tours... and include links to the band's blog."